Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

New to the US market is swoopo.com an auction site, but not one like you know and hate love like eBay.  No, swoopo is a very different and interesting concept.  The price you pay is the cost of bidding plus the ending final price.  Confused?

Each bid costs $1.  Yes, you pay to bid.  You can buy bids in groups of 20 up to 500.  So every time you bid, you are charged $1.  Now the flip side of this is the prices are very low on goods.  For example, a 2nd gen 8gb iPod touch just went for $73.80 (final sales price, who knows how much that person spent in bids to claim it).  They seem stocked with lots of gadgets, laptops and even jewelry.

It gets more interesting…

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Pixlr, a program from Sweden that some compare to Photoshop Express, is a web-based photo editing software that really holds it’s weight.  When you click on the Pixlr.com link, you will immediately be brought to the site and invited to “jump right in” and begin using the software. Flash based, it is actually really rather simple to use for anyone even vaguely familiar with photo editing. 

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Despite previous statements declaring that their online service would be offering live video streaming some time this year, a source inside now states that YouTube won’t be going live after all. There goes the business plans of several planning to make a buck off the live streaming idea, like the somewhat cult-popular lifecast justin.tv. Some outsiders have thought this was the next expected step for YouTube, being that they make a killing in the market for pre-recorded Web video. Even Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, lent plausibility to the leap to live streaming when the idea first hit the public’s ear by telling Pop 17’s Sarah Meyer’s “Live video is something we always wanted to do but haven’t had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to launch something this year.” Well, that was in February, and it isn’t happening, and sources say it won’t be happening next year either.

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“Pics show beauty topless, kissing married TV star”..
“Reality show couple calls it quits"…
“Star is skin and bones on red carpet”...or if you don’t like that anorexically-inclined headline, try “Skinny actress frumpy in white"…
“One busy, hot mama tells how to get in shape quickly"…

At 10:30 p.m. PST on July 15, 2008 - the end of a day that saw more stomach-churning stock market volatility, more violent death in Iraq and Afghanistan and closer poll results in the presidential race - the front page of AOL showed some, shall we say, interesting priorities among those who are making the news judgment calls and authorizing the headlines at this major portal.

Not that Yahoo! or MSN, viewed at the same time, were in danger of being confused with PBS’s “Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” It’s just that AOL seemed to be taking most of its news cues lately from its sister entertainment/celebrity gossip website TMZ.com. 

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In an attempt to be more proactive rather than simply reactive, the MPAA has recently approved the DreamStream system and its 2048-bit “military strength” anti-piracy encryption technology to protect content streamed to viewers online.

First introduced to the MPAA in March of 2008 by Laura Tunberg, MGM’s former vice president of intellectual property enforcement, it was since reviewed by the MPAA and found it to be a viable means for securing digital content. Chief development officer for DreamStream, Ulf Diebel, is excited by this acknowledgment of their product.

“We are very excited to have the MPAA stand behind our technology.”

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I don’t know if any of you at home have both the BBC iPlayer and 4OD (on demand) but for those they don’t, they are essentially ways of watching the last weeks worth of TV on your PC from the respective channels (ITV doesn’t get a look in because theirs simply isn’t that good). Basically the main difference between them is that the BBC iPlayer has no adverts but the 4OD has a catalog of past series, and it is the latter that makes the 4OD that little bit better. It is a shame if you catch the end of a series but can’t watch the rest, or if you are away for over a week.

However TV fans do not fear, because the BBC has plans to incorporate all (that’s right, all) off their catalog onto the BBC iPlayer setup. That means 80 years of classics such as Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Montly Python and even Bargain Hunter will be available at your fingertips. 

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The internet pornography industry is massive, of that there is no doubt, and the USA hosts 89% (244,661,900) of them. This is a staggering figure, and one that first points towards a degrading society, and then to what impact this is having on the children of today. Statistics show that the average age that a child first sees pornography on the internet is 11, and that within the 8-16 age bracket 90% of children have viewed porn online. So is it really surprising that children are putting naked photos of them selves online? Not really.

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Both Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are now offering their services - and servers - to consumers who want to store their personal health records (PHRs) online. Consumer advocates say they’ll be keeping a close eye on both technology giants to make sure they have a healthy respect for their customers’ privacy.

Yet Google Health’s privacy policy admits that its service is not covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act (HIPPA), which Congress passed 12 years ago to protect medical records. And HealthVault’s privacy policy makes no mention of HIPPA, instead asking consumers to put their trust in TRUSTe, the independent, non-profit group founded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and sponsored by Microsoft and AOL, for enforcement of privacy standards.

I asked the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. for its reaction to Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. The email I received from Deven McGraw, director of the CDT’s Health Privacy Project, acknowledges that both companies have good privacy policies.

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Don’t look now but Adobe’s free Photoshop Express is gradually becoming a powerful online image editing tool. They have just introduced some new features, which include a slide show feature. This slide show works similar to other online slide show applications such as SlideShow and the slide show tools found in Flickr and Photobucket. Users can also choose to embed the Photoshop Express slideshow on websites, blogs, and social networks.

Aside from the slide show feature, Photoshop Express has also recently introduced the ability to interact directly with photo-sharing community such as Flickr. This feature, as we previously mentioned enables users to take photos in their accounts from Flickr, edit them in Photoshop Express then export back to Flickr. Sounds neat eh? Wait, there’s more. Users can also easily save a copy of their edited photos and then tinker with the copy instead of the original. Hence users are assured that the original copy is intact even if they mess up the new version.

Via [Switched]

Hulu.com has seen growing trends in its viewership, so much so that News Corp and NBC Universal have decided to distribute its service to seven new sites. Hulu users watched a total of 63.2 million videos on its website last April and the average Hulu user spends around 129.3 minutes per month. Because of the enormous usage of the site, Hulu is set to distribute its videos on TV.com, TVGuide.com, Break.com and Zap2it.com.

Hulu had been reported to exceed the level of usage of all US television network websites in its first month after the official site launching – as stated in the VideoCensus data by ACNielsen.

Although Google’s YouTube remain to be the unbeatable site for online videos, Hulu has made remarkable milestones as a competitor. Major advertisers like McDonalds and Bank of America have already been attracted by the video website. Now that Hulu is beginning to further distribute its service, it should definitely see continued increase in its viewership.

Read [Reuters]